Pen drawing of two swallows in flight, one with a medallion on its wing and filigree scrolls around it, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two swallows in flight with ornate scrolls

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

Two swallows are drawn in flight, one higher and angled to the right, the other lower and facing left. Both birds have fine black linework with detailed feathers, small dot stippling and oval medallions on their bodies. Swirling filigree scrolls surround the birds and trail from the upper swallow, and the drawing is in black ink on pale paper with a faint peach wash in the background.

Fine line Neo-trad Swallow Bird Flight Filigree Scroll Medallion Feather Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom, the big top came down in Thirsk on Tuesday, pole by pole, and Mr Dunn didn't say a word through the whole of it. He stood by the wagon with his hat in his hands while the canvas folded like a sheet off a bed nobody sleeps in any more. The swallows were still nesting in the rigging, so we left the last two spans standing until the young ones had fledged, and I watched them practise over the empty sawdust ring as if someone had set out a new act just for them.

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The company's silver is all sold now. The gilt scrollwork off the lion cage went to a dealer from Ripon for eleven pounds, and the medallions Mrs Coyle stitched onto the flyers' bodices in 1958 went into a biscuit tin, one for each of us. Mine is an oval of worn brass with an S pressed into it. Sophie Dunn used to say a bird wearing a medallion would never fall, which is the sort of thing a girl says at seventeen when the net is still up.

The net came down on Tuesday with everything else. Yet the upper swallow, the one with the ribbon of curls trailing off its wing, came back to the ring after the fledglings had gone and sat on the bare bar most of the afternoon. I stood under it with the broom and did not sweep. Perhaps they can't read the notices either.